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About this blog

I'm a well-known mainframe performance guy, with almost 30 years of experience helping customers manage systems. I also dabble in lots of other technology. I've sought to widen the Performance role, incorporating aspects of infrastructural architecture.
I'm a world-famous podcaster and screencaster (albeit VERY thinly spread). :-)

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A couple of years ago I was chatting to Firefox developers on IRC about the need for a memory map in the browser. I won't claim any credit at all for it happening. (In fact I don't know when it did get implemented.) If you want to figure out where the memory's going use about:memory . Here's a nice post showing where it proved invaluable to the developers: You make what you measure by Nicholas... [More]

Well, how many do you have? I'll admit to 4 on my Windows XP Laptop (and 2 versions of 1 on my ASUS EEE PC, running Linux)... I firmly believe in having an "emergency browser". At 0ne time that would have been Internet Explorer - for two reasons: To recover a broken browser. As I mainly use Firefox Nightly builds I sometimes get cases where I need a fresh install of a prior nightly to get me out... [More]

Occasionally you'll (hopefully briefly) see SPAM comments on this blog. I'm grown up about this sort of thing and just remove the comments when I see them. I hope you're grown up enough to cope with this irritating phenomenon as well. But I've gotten fed up with having to mark these comments as SPAM. So I added some code to my Firefox extension to create a little button on my "Comment Management"... [More]

Nowadays - actually thenadays :-) but more so nowadays - the value of a web page is related to how well structured it is. Well structured from a mashup programmer's point of view... As I often say you have to assume that people will want to take your web pages and mash them up in ways you never thought likely. If your web page is hard to navigate, extract material from, etc then people will use... [More]

I'm going to have to stop adding "(sic)" after every use of the word "Referer". As in "Referer URL". The term itself comes from one of the standard HTTP headers. And therefore is somewhat fixed. Despite giving my "wetware spell checker" a pink fit on a frequent basis. :-) Anyhow, in this blog entry I talked about how I can - as standard - get a display of the URLs people come from to land on my... [More]

Finally the last web application I use that required Internet Explorer is replaced with a Firefox-friendly version (or so we've been told). Hurrah! Except, as always, I'll believe that when I see it. (This is our Online Travel Reservations application that used an ActiveX control. Now it looks very much like an Eclipse application, except I'm certain that's just a styling thing.) And so I start to... [More]